Between her as yet unsuccessful attempts to get a foothold in the movies or on television, Kristin Chenoweth keeps returning to Broadway, and the theater is richer for it. This season, she has jumped headlong into a role she was born to play, movie star Lily Garland in a snazzy revival of 1978’s On the Twentieth Century, a screwball showbiz comedy adapted into an over-the-top … [Read more...]
Early music specialist Jeannette Sorrell comes to New World
If you were a member of the prosperous middle class of Leipzig in the early part of the 18th century, chances are you’d have made it over to the Catharinenstrasse on a wintry Friday night to catch the cantor of the city’s St. Thomas Church, one Johann Sebastian Bach, holding forth at the head of an instrumental ensemble playing some of the best new music of the time. You’d … [Read more...]
Sundays: The era of alt-delete
By Myles Ludwig Erase thyself. This might very well turn out to be the 11th Commandment of the early 21st century. It could be the Holy Grail of semi-privacy or just a cure for the bewildering, often incapacitating condition of Kardashiana, popularly known as TMI. Like most cures (the off-label uses of moldy bread, for example), this one was discovered by accident. Thanks … [Read more...]
Theater roundup: From a classic French novel to contemporary American whimsy
Hardly broken and certainly not in need of fixing, the hugely successful epic musical of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables turned 25 a couple of years ago, so producer Cameron Mackintosh celebrated the milestone of the international hit by lavishing a new, redesigned and restaged production on it. The work of directing team of Laurence Connor and James Powell is more conventional … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Aug. 5-7
Theater: Sharr White’s Six Years looks at the ups and downs of the second half of the 20th century, as seen through the struggles of Phil and Meredith Granger (Todd Allen Durkin and Margery Lowe), a married couple separated by World War II, who are challenged to re-establish a normal life when he returns from combat suffering from a trauma that is dismissively diagnosed as … [Read more...]